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Overview

When African American intellectuals announced the birth of the "New Negro" around the turn of the twentieth century, they were attempting through a bold act of renaming to change the way blacks were depicted and perceived in America. By challenging stereotypes of the Old Negro, and declaring that the New Negro was capable of high achievement, black writers tried to revolutionize how whites viewed blacks--and how blacks viewed themselves. Nothing less than a strategy to re-create the public face of "the race," the New Negro became a dominant figure of racial uplift between Reconstruction and World War II, as well as a central idea of the Harlem, or New Negro, Renaissance. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Gene Andrew Jarrett, The New Negro collects more than one hundred canonical and lesser-known essays published between 1892 and 1938 that examine the issues of race and representation in African American culture.

These readings--by writers including W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Alain Locke, Carl Van Vechten, Zora Neale Hurston, and Richard Wright--discuss the trope of the New Negro, and the milieu in which this figure existed, from almost every conceivable angle. Political essays are joined by essays on African American fiction, poetry, drama, music, painting, and sculpture. More than fascinating historical documents, these essays remain essential to the way African American identity and history are still understood today.

What People Are Saying

Cornel West

This illuminating and indispensable anthology lays bare a fascinating genealogy of the most frequently invoked trope in the history of U.S. Black culture and politics: The New Negro. Professors Gates and Jarrett take us on an intellectual journey through a crucial half century of Black thought that remains relevant in our time!
— Cornel West, author of "Race Matters" and "Democracy Matters"

Hutchinson

This anthology will make a marvelous companion to any course on the Harlem Renaissance or the 'New Negro' phenomenon, and an excellent resource even for advanced scholars looking for a compendium of essays that contextualize African American cultural and political thought between the 1890s and 1930s. The range of authors is admirable and many of these essays are immensely readable—pithy, vituperative, inspiriting, and humorous by turns.
— George B. Hutchinson, Indiana University

Valerie Smith

Bringing together a comprehensive body of essays from a wide range of fields, this anthology will be invaluable to scholars and students of the period from the late nineteenth century to the end of the Harlem Renaissance. It provides not only canonical texts, but also lesser-known pieces, so that it will enhance our understanding of this important period.
— Valerie Smith, Princeton University

Editorial Reviews

Choice

Recent years have seen an explosion of writings on the so-called new Negro. . . . Now Gates and Jarrett lend their considerable voices to the discussion. Including an excellent introduction that situates the debate, this anthology collects some 100 essays on the trope of the new Negro between 1892 and 1938, years that broadly encompass the period known as the Harlem Renaissance. . . . The book covers not only literature but also music, theater, and the fine arts and convincingly links them with social and political happenings of the period. . . . [O]verall this is a masterful piece of work.

Los Angeles Times Book Review
- Erin Aubry Kaplan

Because 'New Negro' is really just a catchprase for the capacious topic of race in America, this is less an anthology than a mix of articles, criticism, essays, theories, calls to action and commentary by people both black and white, ranging from the famous (Richard Wright, James Weldon Johnson, H.L. Mencken) to those lesser known but prominent in their time (Alain Locke). The result is a spirited...dialectic tracing the most intense period of New Negro discussions, between 1892 and 1938.

Callaloo
- Gabriel A. Briggs

The New Negro is a valuable collection of essays that is accessible to scholars, teachers, and those generally interested in African-American history. When placed within the context of recent New Negro scholarship, the anthology reinforces the need to expand the depth and breadth of research into Post-Reconstruction representations of race in African-American culture.

J. Parascandola

Recent years have seen an explosion of writings on the so-called new Negro. . . . Now Gates and Jarrett lend their considerable voices to the discussion. Including an excellent introduction that situates the debate, this anthology collects some 100 essays on the trope of the new Negro between 1892 and 1938, years that broadly encompass the period known as the Harlem Renaissance. . . . The book covers not only literature but also music, theater, and the fine arts and convincingly links them with social and political happenings of the period. . . . [O]verall this is a masterful piece of work.

From the Publisher

"Because 'New Negro' is really just a catchprase for the capacious topic of race in America, this is less an anthology than a mix of articles, criticism, essays, theories, calls to action and commentary by people both black and white, ranging from the famous (Richard Wright, James Weldon Johnson, H.L. Mencken) to those lesser known but prominent in their time (Alain Locke). The result is a spirited...dialectic tracing the most intense period of New Negro discussions, between 1892 and 1938."--Erin Aubry Kaplan, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Recent years have seen an explosion of writings on the so-called new Negro. . . . Now Gates and Jarrett lend their considerable voices to the discussion. Including an excellent introduction that situates the debate, this anthology collects some 100 essays on the trope of the new Negro between 1892 and 1938, years that broadly encompass the period known as the Harlem Renaissance. . . . The book covers not only literature but also music, theater, and the fine arts and convincingly links them with social and political happenings of the period. . . . [O]verall this is a masterful piece of work."--L. J. Parascandola, Long Island University, for CHOICE

"The New Negro is a valuable collection of essays that is accessible to scholars, teachers, and those generally interested in African-American history. When placed within the context of recent New Negro scholarship, the anthology reinforces the need to expand the depth and breadth of research into Post-Reconstruction representations of race in African-American culture."--Gabriel A. Briggs, Callaloo

Los Angeles Times Book Review

Because 'New Negro' is really just a catchprase for the capacious topic of race in America, this is less an anthology than a mix of articles, criticism, essays, theories, calls to action and commentary by people both black and white, ranging from the famous (Richard Wright, James Weldon Johnson, H.L. Mencken) to those lesser known but prominent in their time (Alain Locke). The result is a spirited...dialectic tracing the most intense period of New Negro discussions, between 1892 and 1938.
— Erin Aubry Kaplan

Callaloo

The New Negro is a valuable collection of essays that is accessible to scholars, teachers, and those generally interested in African-American history. When placed within the context of recent New Negro scholarship, the anthology reinforces the need to expand the depth and breadth of research into Post-Reconstruction representations of race in African-American culture.
— Gabriel A. Briggs

Callaloo

The New Negro is a valuable collection of essays that is accessible to scholars, teachers, and those generally interested in African-American history. When placed within the context of recent New Negro scholarship, the anthology reinforces the need to expand the depth and breadth of research into Post-Reconstruction representations of race in African-American culture.
— Gabriel A. Briggs

Library Journal

These readings, edited by professors Gates and Jarrett, examine the transition of blacks from colored to Negro between Reconstruction and World War II, with notables like Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, Anna Julia Cooper, and Zora Neale Hurston reflecting on such themes as education, literature, art, poetry, music, and much more.

Meet the Author

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. His most recent books include "Finding Oprah's Roots" and "The Trials of Phillis Wheatley". Gene Andrew Jarrett is associate professor of English and African American studies at Boston University. He is the author of "Deans and Truants: Race and Realism in African American Literature".

We are at the commencement of a "negroid" renaissance ... that will have in time as much importance in literary history as the much spoken of and much praised Celtic and Canadian renaissance. -William Stanley Braithwaite (1901) ... Rough hewn from the jungle and the desert's sands, Slavery was the chisel that fashioned him to form, And gave him all the arts and sciences had won. The lyncher, mob, and stake have been his emery wheel, TO MAKE A POLISHED MAN of strength and power. In him, the latest birth of freedom, God hath again made all things new. Europe and Asia with ebbing tides recede, America's unfinished arch of freedom waits, Till he, the corner stone of strength Is lifted into place and power. Behold him! dauntless and unafraid he stands. He comes with laden arms, Bearing rich gifts to science, religion, poetry and song ... -Reverend Reverdy C. Ransom, "The New Negro" (1923)

The three epigraphs tell the classic story of the American Negro's symbolic transition from "Old" to "New" betweenReconstruction and World War II. During this period, the Old Negro was a trope that depicted the African diaspora as an inferior race. Allegedly, Negro uncles, mammies, and chillun' dressed, talked, behaved, and thought in ways that lacked the kind of sophistication and refinement generally attributed to Anglo America. Such caricatures oversimplified black subjectivity and experiences, while ridiculing the idea of black assimilability to American civilization. African American discourses of the New Negro, however, emerged to contest degrading black stereotypes. Literature, photographs, illustrations, theater, and speeches were but a few of the contexts in which African Americans declared that the race could be morally, intellectually, and culturally elevated to civilization.

In the wake of recent scholarship that has examined the remarkable history of the New Negro, this anthology hopes to flesh it out even further, showing why the New Negro was one of the most compelling stories of racial uplift that circulated throughout U.S. intellectual society, culture, and politics. By reprinting approximately one hundred canonical and lesser-known essays written or published between 1892 and 1938, we lay the groundwork for scholars, teachers, students, and general readers to learn more about the political interconnection of race, representation, and African American culture. Racial representation, we argue, functioned as an ideological or philosophical bridge between the cultural politics and the political culture of African America. Culture politics-or the politics of culture-mainly refers to how people acquire, understand, and apply power in their relationships to one another. Such power relations, in turn, underwrite the formation of certain patterns of human values, discourses, attitudes, actions, or artifacts. By contrast, political culture-or the culture of politics-emphasizes how cultural patterns inform the institutions, organizations, and interest groups of public policy or governmental activity. With these two preliminary definitions in mind, this anthology aims to show that the New Negro was a major discursive cornerstone of racial representation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. What is more, this discourse helped to generate the terms by which we describe and understand African American culture today.

The tropes, politics, and discourses of racial uplift that we intend to explain in this introduction outline the parameters of what could be thought of as "New Negro criticism." This tradition comprises not only essays that explicitly mention the term "New Negro," but also those involved in a wider critical conversation on race, representation, and African American culture-a conversation of which the trope of a New Negro was, of course, an original, defining feature. For this anthology, we have chosen a vast array of essays written by sophisticated critics, historians, and thinkers interested in anchoring the meanings of art, culture, and politics to racial Representation.

The Trope of a New Negro

Frederick Douglass, the great nineteenth-century writer and orator, was widely advertised during his lifetime as "the representative colored man of the United States." It was a designation that Douglass liked; indeed, he seemed to have encouraged its use. What a curious manner by which to be known, or by which to be recalled: the representative colored man of these United States. But in what sense was Frederick Douglass "representative"? In the sense of mode, or mean, or median? Certainly not Frederick Douglass, a man of learning, an author of three masterful autobiographies as well as hundreds of speeches and essays. Douglass could not be mistaken for the mean, the mode, or the median of the African American community of the nineteenth century. Clearly, another sense of representation obtains here, one that we tend to forget.

Douglass was the representative colored man in the United States because he was the most presentable. And he was the most presentable because of the presence he had established as a master of voice. When Douglass spoke or wrote, he did so "for" the Negro, in a relation of part for whole. He spoke to recreate the public face of the race. Douglass, then, was the most representative colored man both because he represented black people most eloquently and elegantly, and because he was the race's great opportunity to re-present itself in the court of racist public opinion. African Americans sought to re-present their public selves in order to reconstruct their public, reproducible images.

The word "reconstruction" and the concepts that it connotes are so familiar to American historians and to scholars of African American studies that we tend to forget the word's etymology and its complex layers of signification. The dictionary states that to reconstruct means "to construct anew in the mind; to restore [something past] mentally." "Reconstruction," it tells us, consists of "the action or process of reconstructing," or "an instance or example of this; a thing reconstructed." "Reconstruction" is also the proper name for "the process by which after the Civil War the States which had seceded were restored to the rights and privileges of the Union." This period, we know, commenced officially with the passage (over President Andrew Johnson's veto) of the Reconstruction Act of 1867, and ended with what is known popularly as the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877. Reconstruction, then, endured officially for a mere ten years, to be replaced by a dark period in American history known as Redemption, which Sterling Brown once said lasted in the South from roughly 1876 "to yesterday"! By the turn of the century, Southern Redemption had become fused with black disenfranchisement and the rise of the white supremacist movement, led by the Ku Klux Klan.

Moreover, the dictionary defines "construction" as the process of putting "a specified interpretation on." "Construction" also means "the action of framing, devising, or forming, by the putting together of parts." "Construction" signifies as well "the manner in which a thing is artificially constructed or naturally formed; structure, conformation, disposition." "Construction," finally, is "a thing constructed; a material structure; a formation of the mind or genius." Here, of greatest concern are the latter two definitions: the manner in which a thing is artificially formed, and the structure of a formation of the mind and the imagination. Of greatest concern, more specifically, are two antithetical figures of the black-the curious heritage of the New Negro, and the white figure of the black as Sambo- and the complex relation that obtains between them.

These two figures bear an antithetical relation to each other, and function in a relation of reversal. Whereas the image of a "New Negro" has served various generations of black intellectuals as a sign of plenitude, regeneration, or a truly reconstructed presence, the image of the black in what could be thought of as "Sambo Art" has served various generations of racists as a sign of lack, degeneration, or a truly negated absence. The two sets of figures can also be said to have a certain cause-and-effect relation. The fiction of an American Negro who is "now" somehow "new" or different from an "Old Negro" was sought to counter the image in the popular American imagination of the black as devoid of all the characteristics that supposedly separated the lower forms of human life from the higher forms.

In an accurate, if humorous, sense, blacks have felt the need to attempt to "reconstruct" their image probably since that dreadful day in 1619, when the first boatload of Africans disembarked in Virginia. Africans and their descendants commenced their cultural lives in this hemisphere as veritable deconstructions of all that the West so ardently wished itself to be. Almost as soon as blacks could write, it seems, they set out to redefine-against already received racist stereotypes-who and what a black person was, and how unlike the racist stereotype the black original could actually be. To counter these racist stereotypes, white and black writers erred on the side of nobility, and posited equally fictitious black archetypes, from Oroonoko in 1688 to Kunta Kinte in more recent times. If various Western cultures constructed blackness as an absence, then various generations of black authors have attempted to reconstruct blackness as a presence.

Reconstruction, of course, is a broad concept that, in regard to the Negro in America, spans a period longer than the decade separating the Reconstruction Act and the Hayes-Tilden Compromise. Indeed, black intellectual reconstruction commenced in the antebellum slave narratives, published mainly between the 1830s and the early 1860s, and ended (if indeed it has ended) in the decade after the New Negro, or Harlem, Renaissance of the 1920s. And the trope of reconstruction was the trope of the New Negro in African American discourse between Reconstruction and World War II. This long period, rather than the short one between 1867 and 1877, was the crux of the period of black intellectual reconstruction. For the literary critic, there is little choice. Between 1866 and 1877, for example, black people published as books only two novels, one in 1867 and one in 1871. Between 1892 and 1938, however, African American writers published close to seventy-five novels.

While a dramatic upsurge of energy in the American body politic had characterized the period known as Reconstruction, the corpus of African American literature and culture, on the other hand, enjoyed no such apparent vitalization. On the contrary, blacks published more novels between 1853 and 1865, when they were fighting slavery, than they did when they were at least nominally free, the freest that blacks had been since the day before they set sail for Virginia in 1619. It is as if the great and terrible subject of African American literature-slavery-found no immediate counterpart when blacks were freed. Once Redemption had established itself as a new form of enslavement for African Americans, they regained a public voice, louder and more strident than it had been even during slavery.

This stands as a paradox of our intellectual history. One of the most important contributions to African American literature between 1866 and 1877 was written not by a black person at all but by Mark Twain. His 1874 short story, "A True Story," purports to be "Aunt Rachel's" oral narration of her own enslavement, rendered entirely in what we call "dialect." In other words, Reconstruction was not a time of a great renaissance of African American letters, but the period between this moment and World War II was the era of the myth of a New Negro, a New Negro in search of a cultural renaissance capable of accommodating it.

The "New Negro," of course, was only a metaphor, a trope. The paradox of this claim was inherent in the trope itself, combining as it did a concern with time, antecedents, and heritage, on the one hand, with that for a cleared space, the public face of the race, on the other. The figure, moreover, combined implicitly both an eighteenth-century vision of utopia with a nineteenth-century idea of progress to form a black fin-de-siècle dream of an unbroken, unhabituated, neological self-signified by the upper case in "Negro" and the belated adjective "New." A paradox of this sort of self-willed beginning was that its "success" depended fundamentally upon self-negation, a turning away from the "Old Negro" and the labyrinthine memory of black enslavement and toward the register of a "New Negro," an irresistible, spontaneously generated black and sufficient self.

Perhaps a more profound paradox of this form of neological utopia was that this willed, ideal state of being and renewal could exist only in what Michel Foucault has called "the non-place of language," precisely because it was mainly a rhetorical or discursive figure. And, just as utopia signifies "no-place," so did "New Negro" signify a "black person who lives at no place," and at no time. It was a bold and audacious act of language, signifying the will to power, to dare to recreate a race by renaming it, despite the dubiousness of the venture. It was this kind of racial-historical fiction-the weary black dream of a perfect state of being, with no history in particular detail, rather than the search for a group of black and especial historical entities-which contemporary literary scholars must historicize.

Frank E. and Fritzie P. Manuel, writing in Utopian Thought in the Western World (1979), have aptly characterized the latent content of all utopic thought thusly: "The great utopia startles and yet is recognized as conceivable. It is not a sleeping or bizarre vision but one that satisfies a hunger or stimulates the mind and the body to the recognition of a new potentiality [...]. It can be studied as a reflection of the specific crises that it presumes to resolve [...]. It may capture the anguish of an epoch in a striking metaphor." The weary dream of a perfected state of being, with no history, the dream of naming a second, new self, was emblematic of the anguish in African American history. This naming ritual, in short, was prefigured in the autobiographical texts of the ex-slaves published before 1865. Frederick Douglass called himself by three surnames before he stumbled upon "Douglass." Sojourner Truth, in her own autobiographical narrative, strongly recalls the naming of her newly freed self, and attributes that art to the grace of God:

My name was Isabella; but when I left the house of bondage, I left everything behind. I wan't goin' to keep nothin' of Egypt on me, an' so I went to the Lord an' asked him to give me a new name. An' the Lord give me Sojourner, because I was to travel up an' down the land, showin' the people their sins, an' bein' a sign unto them. Afterward I told de Lord I wanted another name, 'cause everybody else had two names; an de' Lord give me Truth, because I was to declare the truth to de people.

In Up from Slavery (1901), Booker T. Washington, the Negro self as endowed institution, confirms Truth's declaration of the name as a "sign" of the self, even if a less natural relationship prevailed between the sign and its referent for most Negroes than it did for her: "After the coming of freedom there were two points upon which practically all the people on our place were agreed, and I find that this was generally true throughout the South: that they must change their names, and that they must leave the old plantation for at least a few days or weeks in order that they might really feel that they were free."

Table of Contents

NOTE: For essays originally published without thematic titles, we have provided them in brackets.

Acknowledgments xi Introduction by Gates and Jarrett 1
The Trope of a New Negro 2
New Negro Politics 6
New Negro Uplift 10
Race, Representation, and African American Culture 14
Notes 18

CHAPTER I: THE NEW NEGRO "The New Negro" by Rev. W.E.C. Wright 23
"An Appeal to the King" by J.W.E. Bowen 26
"Afro-American Education" by Booker T. Washington 33
"Heroes and Martyrs" by N.B. Wood 36
"The Club Movement among Colored Women of America" by Fannie Barrier Williams 54
"The Intellectual Progress of the Colored Women of the United States since the Emancipation Proclamation" 59
"Rough Sketches: A Study of the Features of the New Negro Woman" by by John Henry Adams, Jr. 66
"Rough Sketches: The New Negro Man" 67
"An Ostracised Race in Ferment: The Conflict of Negro Parties and Negro Leaders Over Methods of Dealing with Their Own Problem" by Ray Stannard Baker 69
"The New Negro" by William Pickens 79
"Returning Soldiers" by W.E.B. Du Bois 85
"The New Negro and the U.N.I.A." by Marcus Garvey 92
As to "'The New Negro'" by Anonymous 96
"The New Negro" by Geroid Robinson 97
"The New Politics" by Hubert H. Harrison 101
"Education and the Race" 107
"The New Negro" by Alain Locke 112
"Sterling Brown: The New Negro Folk-Poet" 119
"The New Negro Hokum" by Gustavus Adolphus Stewart 123
"Who Is the New Negro, and Why?" by J.A. Rogers 129
"The New Negro as Revealed in His Poetry" by Charlotte E. Taussig 131
"La Bourgeoisie Noire" E. Franklin Frazier 137
"The New Negro in Paris" by Claude McKay 141
"The Rise of the Black Internationale" by George S. Schuyler 149

CHAPTER II: HOW SHOULD ART PORTRAY THE NEGRO? "One Phase of American Literature" by Anna Julia Cooper 157
["Negro in Literature"] by Paul Laurence Dunbar 172
"The Negro in Books" by Charles W. Chesnutt 173
"The Negro in Literature" by William Stanley Braithwaite 182
"The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed" The Crisis Symposium 190
"Some Aspects of the Negro Interpreted in Contemporary American and European Literature" by John Frederick Matheus 204
"The Negro in Recent American Literature" by Eugene Clay 211

CHAPTER VII: LITERATURE: POETRY
"Some Contemporary Poets of the Negro Race" by William Stanley Braithwaite 401
"Dunbar's Poetry in Literary English" by Charles Eaton Burch 407
"The Negro in Poetry" by John Edward Bruce 410
"Old School of Negro'Critics'Hard on Paul Laurence Dunbar" by Thomas Millard Henry 413
"Negro Poets and Their Poetry" by Wallace Thurman 415
"The Negro Poets of the United States" by Alain Locke 422
"Mr. Garvey as a Poet" by T. Thomas Fortune 426
"Preface (from The Book of American Negro Poetry)" by James Weldon Johnson 426

CHAPTER X: THEATER
"The Negro in Drama" by Rollin Lynde Hartt 507
"Reflections on O'Neill's Plays" by Paul Robeson 510
"The Drama of Negro Life" by Montgomery Gregory 511
"The Gift of Laughter" by Jessie Fauset 515
"Same Old Blues" by Theophilus Lewis 518
"The Drama of Negro Life" by Alain Locke 521
"The Negro in the Field of Drama" by Rowena Woodham Jelliffe 524
"Has the Negro a Place in the Theatre?" by Jules Bledsoe 526
"A Criticism of the Negro Drama as It Relates to the Negro Dramatist and Artist" by Eulalie Spence 527
"From Black Manhattan" by James Weldon Johnson 528
"The Negro Theatre--A Dodo Bird" by Ralph Matthews 532

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